Conclusion

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is the first major expansion for CDPR's super-hit game. It comes with an independent side-story that doesn't require previous knowledge of the main campaign. The story revolves around the crash of Space Force One, carrying the president of the New United States of America. As expected, you get tasked with the rescue of this VIP and to achieve your goal you have to enter a new city district called "Dogtown," which reminds us of a failed Las Vegas that was never completed. Dogtown combines opulent structures with neon lights, conveying a stark contrast between past luxury and present decay. You also get to pay local overlord Colonel Hansen a visit in his military fortress. I have to say I really like the story of Phantom Liberty. While pretty linear, it's an interesting mix, reminding me of the TV show 24, paired with some Tom Clancy spy novel writing and a sprinkle of House of Cards on top. I was also reminded of John Carpenter's "Escape from New York" (1981), starring the legendary Kurt Russel as Snake Plissken.

In terms of graphics, Phantom Liberty adds some improvement to the base game, even though the game engine is virtually identical. In my original review I've complained about the boring super-flat floors and streets, the level designers have definitely made some changes here and the environments are much more interesting. Check out our screenshots, there's tons of geometry and lots of interesting things to see. CP2077 always had this simulation-like "something is happening nearby that's unrelated to you" vibe and CDPR has added more of that. There's dynamic traffic, gangsters, police patrols, people going about their business, getting into fights or just having a good time.

What I don't like is the quality on bystander character models. At a bit of a distance they still look like they are made up from only few colors, with relatively few polygons, other game engines handle this better. Many indoor scenes are richly populated with objects, but others look quite poor, like the designers just built the room in a few minutes (they probably did). Last but not least, can we get a proper way to skip the multiple intro screens please? Everybody has seen them by now.

The game designers have made fantastic use of lighting and shadows, which creates very lifelike environments, especially at night. What's extremely useful here is that you now get support for path tracing—the future of graphics in gaming. Traditional ray tracing techniques in games focus only on a certain effect, like reflections, lighting or shadows, which can later be combined of course. Path tracing works differently, it's just a single algorithm that covers everything. For each pixel on your screen, a ray is cast into the scene that bounces around, depending on the surfaces it encounters and that ultimately falls into a light source. This whole path is traced and evaluated, to determine the final color of that pixel on your screen—millions of times per frame, many times per second. As you can imagine this increases hardware requirements dramatically, more on that later.

All our screenshots were taken with path tracing enabled, and upscaling disabled, so you can get a feel for the very best scenery offered in Phantom Liberty. I have to say I'm impressed. Things look so much better and more realistic, especially when you actively look for such differences. When focusing on gameplay, the title actually still looks fantastic without ray tracing enabled, which is good news for the masses of gamers that want to enjoy the game but don't have the hardware for ray tracing.

We ran several rounds of benchmarks for this article, on a wide selection of graphics cards at various settings. Instead of the in-game benchmark we used our own test scene that's within the Phantom Liberty expansion area, to get a proper feel for the hardware requirements of the expansion (and not the base game). Our first test run is rasterization only, at ultra settings, without any ray tracing. Here we're seeing very decent framerates across the board. To reach 60 FPS at 1080p you need a Radeon RX 7600 or RTX 4060. 1440p with 60 FPS is possible for many cards, too, you'll need RX 7700 XT or RTX 4070 or better. 4K60 is pretty challenging though—only the RTX 4090 can handle it (without any upscaling tech).

Next up is rasterization at ultra, plus ray traced reflections, sun shadows, local shadows and ray traced lighting at "Medium." Here the hardware requirements go up quite a bit. At Full HD, the RTX 3090 reached 60.7 FPS, the RTX 4060 55.7 FPS. AMD's fastest the RX 7900 XTX is far behind, with just 49.7 FPS. At higher resolutions, AMD falls behind more and more. While RTX 4090 can reach 36 FPS at 4K, the RX 7900 XTX only gets 17 FPS. No wonder, NVIDIA is promoting Cyberpunk to show their dominance in ray tracing.

Last but not least, we activated path tracing, which brings even the best GPUs down. The mighty RTX 4090 got 61 FPS at 1080p, 4K was almost unplayable at 20 FPS. Things look even worse for AMD, with RX 7900 XTX reaching only 14.5 FPS at 1080p, 8.8 FPS at 1440p and 4.3 FPS at 4K. The good thing is that Phantom Liberty supports all three rivaling upscaling technologies from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel. With DLSS enabled, in "Quality" mode, the RTX 4090 gets 47 FPS at 4K—much more playable. If you enable DLSS 3 Frame Generation on top of that, the FPS reaches a solid 73 FPS. Without DLSS upscaling and just Frame Generation the FPS rate is 38 FPS at 4K, but the latency is too high to make it a good experience, you always need upscaling. Since the upscalers have various quality modes, you can easily trade FPS vs image resolution, which makes the higher ray tracing quality modes an option, even with weaker hardware, but at some point the upscaling pixelation will get more distracting than the benefit from improved rendering technologies.

While NVIDIA and Intel have released game ready driver for Phantom Liberty, AMD is lagging behind, which is happening quite often lately. It seems Intel is pushing much harder for new drivers than team Radeon, which is definitely money well-spent. While testing was trouble-free on Intel and NVIDIA, AMD Radeon cards crashed consistently after a couple of benchmark runs, a reboot would fix the crashes, for a few runs. I'm sure this will be addressed eventually.

NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction is supported in Phantom Liberty, too. This new DLSS technique for ray tracing replaces hand-tuned denoisers with an AI network to generate higher-quality images between sampled rays. DLSS 3.5 recognizes different ray-traced effects, making smarter decisions about using temporal and spatial data, resulting in superior image quality and upscaling. DLSS 3.5 is an important new capability, so we dedicated a full review to it.

Depending on the rendering settings, the VRAM requirements range from "minimal" to "serious." At low settings, the allocations reach around 6 GB, 7 GB at 4K—virtually every recent graphics card should be able to handle that. At maximum settings, but without ray tracing you'll be hitting 8 GB at 1440p—looks pretty well-tuned to me. Once you go ray tracing, you need beefy hardware anyways, so 11 GB at 1440p and 14 GB at 4K aligns pretty well with hardware that can run at these settings. Path tracing adds a few hundred MB on top of RT, so nothing to worry about. Enabling DLSS 3 Frame Generation at 4K, on top of max settings with RT brings the VRAM usage to a stunning 18 GB, which means you better have a RTX 4090. This is without any upscaling though. Once you activate DLSS upscaling, the underlying rendering resolution is lowered, which means VRAM usage goes down a lot, too. Overall I'd say that Phantom Liberty is well-tuned to make the most out of available VRAM, on all cards.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty will be available for $30 on Sep 26th on Steam and GOG. It's DRM-free <3. The Patch 2.0 changes are releasing tomorrow, on Thursday, which includes DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction.